Myth and Realism in Noah’s Ark

Few myths are as simultaneously funny and serious as the story of Noah, the five-hundred-year-old man who was asked to save the world, bunnies and all. With his new cinematic flood epic, Darren Aronofsky aspires to, among other things, wrest Noah from the clutches of modern cartoonists. But even the earliest readers were attuned to the story’s darkly comic inflections. A few ancient interpreters noted the irony built into Noah’s introduction in the Biblical account: “Noah was a righteous, pure man in his generation.” This praise, the commentators pointed out, isn’t saying much when you consider that Noah was from a truly godawful generation, a time period so thoroughly effed that, according to other ancient sources, humans were making love with fish, birds, and reptiles—a generation so conspicuously corrupt that the only way to help them out was to drown them en masse and forget they had ever existed. Among the worst of humanity, the Bible says, Noah was tops.

Aronofsky makes an impressive effort to cast Noah as an epic hero; he does a fine job of imagining the complex family dynamics aboard the ship, and has cleverly filled in the Bible’s spare but suggestive narrative. (What, after all, is the reason that Noah becomes a drunken, broken man after he emerges from the ark?) The Biblical story, by contrast, seems to have other preoccupations: logistics. We get catalogues of the ship’s component parts and its cargo, its measurements, and a digest of its brief but notable career at sea. The drama of the flood story in the Bible isn’t found in the moral conflicts of the man so much as in the body of his ship. If you were making a movie that was more literal in its translation, you’d probably call it “The Ark,” rather than “Noah.”

Coming after the spectacle of God’s creation of the heaven and the earth, the ark is the first impressive man-made creation, the world’s first ambitious piece of technology. In the world of Genesis, which, in its opening chapters, seems fairly remote from ours—a world of slick-talking snakes, cherubs with flaming swords, and guys who live to be eight hundred years old—the ark gives us something pragmatic, something with worldly dimensions. In other words, some literary realism. In its detailed measurements, the text seems to be an invitation to real-life reconstruction, as though the workability of the ship is presented in order to prove the reality of the rest of the story. The details for the construction of the ship represent the first time in the Bible that the narrator—or, if you will, the Lord himself—insists that the story is literally true.

This may account for the appeal of Noah’s story. Certainly for fundamentalist readers, for those who want to see the Bible as a blueprint for life, the ark’s measurements offer a satisfying sort of literalism: an actual blueprint. The absurdity and wrong-headedness of reading the Bible literally is neutralized when such a reading can—if you have some extra time and money on your hands—actually yield a pretty sweet-looking boat. It’s no wonder that people have spent millennia sketching out how such a ship would actually look, and that some have gone to the trouble of building it. The seventy-three-million-dollar replica of the ark currently being built by Creationists in Kentucky, and the recent completion of one man’s twenty-year ark-building project in the Netherlands, are just the most recent examples of attempts to make the text real. The demands of shooting a blockbuster made an ark builder out of Darren Aronofsky, too. (For more on the quest to adapt Noah for the screen, read Tad Friend’s recent Profile of Aronofsky in the magazine.)

The search for the original ark is, itself, a tradition that goes back thousands of years. In America, books claiming to have evidence of the ark’s whereabouts seem to come out every other week. The earliest map of the world, carved into a clay tablet in Mesopotamia, may include the mountain where the ship supposedly wrecked. Unlike other sagas, in which a ship takes the hero on a quest in search of an object of desire, Noah’s ark—the physical retrieval of the ship—is itself the quest.

Our knowledge of the ark story’s earliest readers, and of its authors, is still scant. That’s one of the ironies of the Bible: though the stories have been with us for thousands of years, our understanding of their origins is relatively recent, and still very much a work in progress. Our understanding of the cultural and historical contexts that gave rise to the Biblical text, including our knowledge of the basic meanings of many words, began to crystallize only in the nineteenth century. In an odd way, we’ve only recently begun to learn how to read the Bible.

The Noah story is an excellent example. It wasn’t until 1872, a few decades after cuneiform was deciphered, when the Englishman George Smith astonished the public with his discovery of a Mesopotamian flood saga, written on a cuneiform tablet that had been unearthed in the recently discovered ruined city of Nineveh, that a clear precursor to the Noah story was established. (Upon discovering the tablet, Smith ran and jumped around the British Museum in a wild frenzy and, like Noah himself, began to disrobe.) The earlier Mesopotamian accounts included not only an apocalyptic flood and a guy, tipped off by a god, who saves himself, his family, and the world’s creatures by building a ship, but also specific details, such as the dispatching of a raven and a dove in search of land, the grounding of the ark atop a mountain, and the offering of a sweet-smelling animal sacrifice, just as in the Biblical account. The Hebrew scribes responsible for the Noah story were clearly working, either directly or indirectly, from an earlier literary source.

Of the many insights we’ve gained by comparing Noah with the Mesopotamian sagas, one interesting parallel is the emphasis placed on the technical details involved in the construction of the life-saving ship. The theology was different, and there were critical variations in the narrative (in one of the Mesopotamian versions, humanity wasn’t punished for being morally corrupt, as in the Bible, but for just being really noisy and irritating), and yet, in both traditions, the introduction of realistic technology, including detailed specs, is a key element of the story.

As Irving Finkel, a British scholar, has shown, the attention to technical detail in the various Mesopotamian flood sagas is impressive. In his gem of a book, “The Ark Before Noah,” Finkel, who is a charming raconteur as well as a curator in charge of cuneiform tablets at the British Museum, recounts his own shock and delight upon determining that the boat measurements given in some of the Babylonian flood sagas were not fanciful—even if they were incredibly odd—and that these blueprint dimensions were, indeed, intended to be plausible.

Finkel reveals that the life-saving vessel in some of the Babylonian flood sagas was a coracle, a bowl made of coiled palm-fibre rope and coated with bitumen for waterproofing—in other words, an oversized basket used as a light paddle boat. Coracles, including fairly large ones used for transferring livestock, were common modes of conveyance along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in ancient times, and were in daily use in Iraq until the middle of the twentieth century. Bringing together the Babylonian god Enki’s instructions and our understanding about coracle construction methods, Finkel, with the help of a mathematician friend, calculates the details of the ark project: the area of the base, roof, and walls, the length and width of the ship’s internal structures, the volume of bitumen needed to caulk it inside and out. He accounts for each and every last detail, often to entertaining effect. Regarding the length of rope necessary for constructing the Mesopotamian ark, Finkel, after many steps— including the application of Pappas’s First Centroid Theorem and Ramanujan’s Approximation to calculate the area of the boat’s walls—leaves us with the following equation:

In other words, the length of rope that Atrahasis, Noah’s precursor, needed to coil in order to make his coracle-style ark was roughly a half marathon longer than the distance between Philadelphia and Boston. And then he needed to weave this rope into a coil and waterproof it. It was undoubtedly a gigantic ship—and easily the world’s biggest basket ever—but, as Finkel writes, it does appear that “real data and proper calculation have been injected into the Atrahasis story.” To its earliest readers, plausibility was key to the story’s meaning.

But it is Finkel’s theory about a certain Mesopotamian tablet, which he deciphered in 2009, that offers the most suggestive insight into the ark story’s earliest readers; namely, that they weren’t always readers. Finkel believes that this cuneiform Ark Tablet, as he calls it, isn’t a text of prose or poetry. This version, he says, was written in the dry and concise style of a business document. Finkel conjectures that this version of the flood story was more like theatrical notes, a prompt for an oral storyteller. With some props and aids—a headdress for the god, a drummer, and a flautist—an ancient Babylonian actor could transport his audience into the scene of the Deluge, a world that was ancient even to the ancients. For the story’s dramatic twists and turns, Finkel theorizes, no script was needed: these were the stock-in-trade of the storyteller. But for the technical details of the ship’s construction plan, which had to be both elaborate and accurate in order to truly dazzle the audience, the storyteller needed the Ark Tablet as a crib sheet.

Because the technical details were written down, they have been preserved for us to read—but they aren’t the whole story. That story, alas, is lost to us: we may never know what scenarios, plot turns, and improvised details, what jokes and character studies, the ancient oral storytellers may have given to the men and gods of their flood stories. But it is the commitment to technical accuracy, to ambitious verisimilitude, combined with the large unscripted gaps left to the performer’s dramatic whim, that have opened the doors for our contemporary dramatists to conjure for us, in our own language, what happened—what really happened—when the waters began to rise.

Avi Steinberg is the author of “The Lost Book of Mormon,” which will be published in October.

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